MUSEUM AND FIELD STUDIES OF IROQUOIS MASKS 

 AND RITUALISM 



By WILLIAM N. FENTON 

 Associate Anthropologist, Bureau of American Ethnology 



Early in May 1940 I returned to my Seneca friends on Allegheny 

 River in southwestern New York to learn more about the grotesque 

 wooden false-faces and the rituals of the fraternity known as "The 

 Society of Faces," which, among the Seneca and their Onondaga 

 and Cayuga confederates along Grand River in Ontario, semian- 

 nually puts on the wooden masks and drives sickness from the com- 

 munity. The masks and the rituals differ somewhat locally, and the 

 problem was to establish, through a study of carving techniques 

 and finished masks, local artistic styles, and then to arrange the 

 masks in a series of types according to their form and function. 

 There was the further intriguing problem of determining whether 

 the native classification would confirm or differ from a classification 

 based only on formal features of specimens already present in our 

 museums. Consequently, field interviews were combined with a 

 project of studying Iroquois masks and ceremonial equipment in 

 nearby museums. 



At the New York State Museum in Albany, through the courtesy 

 of the director, Dr. Charles C. Adams, and the kind cooperation of 

 the State archeologist, Noah T. Clarke, the Morgan and large Con- 

 verse collections were measured, annotated, and photographed. The 

 small mask collection of the Montgomery County Historical Society 

 at Fort Johnson was included. At Toronto we received many kind- 

 nesses from Prof. T. F. Mcll wraith while examining the Boyle 

 and Chiefswood collections from Grand River in the Royal Ontario 

 Museum of Archaeology. At the Rochester Museum of Arts and 

 Sciences Dr. Arthur C. Parker, while culling out the older Seneca 

 masks for me, recalled from his field experience following 1905 at 

 Cattaraugus some mask-making techniques that confirmed evidence 

 I had noted in the older masks that they were burned out. We drove 

 through the early historic Seneca town sites to the Bristol Hills, and 

 our conversations lasted far into the night at "Rumpus Hill," my host's 

 retreat above the head of Canandaigua Lake near the traditional 

 homeland of the Seneca. A part of the enormous collections of the 

 Museum of the American Indian was examined at the annex during 

 one day, but the remainder merits another visit. 



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